Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference in the US is gaining in popularity as the on-demand pioneer continues to pile on users, partner support and influence. After last year's announcement of the AppExchange marketplace for trying and buying
applications, Salesforce went even further at this year's event in San Francisco, where it detailed plans to open up its development platform and incubate startups seeking to build applications on its web-based platform.

This could be the biggest platform play by a business software company since Microsoft corralled thousands of independent software vendors through Windows 3.0 and associated developer tools. In an updated version of what Microsoft did with Visual Basic and other tools, Salesforce is making the Apex tools that its developers use available to end-user organisations to create so-called multi-tenancy online applications that run on shared datacentre infrastructure.

Salesforce's approach dovetails with AppExchange so that applications created through Apex tools can be made available for third-parties to try out and purchase.

The company is also providing facilities for startup ventures that commit to its platform. Customers will gain access to computing infrastructure and get sales, marketing and other help from Salesforce for about $20,000 per cubicle per year.
Salesforce has acquired an office complex in San Mateo, California that was formerly the home of Siebel Systems, the leader in traditional client-server customer relationship management (CRM) software. Salesforce is planning to launch a similar UK service, probably next year.

Salesforce's ambition is to create a vast army of developers for the software-as-a-service paradigm and put itself at the heart of a change in software deployments that is ultimately capable of unseating SAP and Oracle.

"Apex changes the rules. I think it's the most important announcement in the history of Salesforce," said Mark Gorenberg, partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Former Oracle president Ray Lane forecast an end to "forklift upgrades" and high maintenance fees. "The big fat middle is going to give up to software-as-a-service because of pure economics," Lane said. "[Apex and AppExchange support] mash-ups of social networking or collaboration or user- generated services or analytics. You have a platform where entrepreneurs can build."

However, client-server systems built up over the past 15 years are unlikely to go away anytime soon, and Salesforce and others in the sector will need to demonstrate scale to continue their progress.

Muj Harris, a marketing adviser for Shell Energy Europe, said the prospect of Salesforce being acquired by a larger firm remained "one area of concern in this world of consolidation".

Harris also noted that Salesforce's focus on CRM and salesforce automation, leaving most other applications to partners, could be another weakness because it made it easier for buyers to focus on suppliers with bigger estates.